Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (73 page)

^*
For a substantial history of
Der Kreis
, see Hubert Kennedy,
The Ideal Gay Man: The Story of Der Kreis
(Binghamton, N.Y.: Harrington Park Press, 1999). Kennedy relied on Steward’s bound volumes of
Der Kreis
(which Steward had donated to San Francisco State University, and which have since disappeared), as well as interviews, articles, and statements by Steward, as central, primary sources for his research.

^*
That list of contributors includes Alan Anthony, Richard Arlen, Victor J. Banis, James Barr, Walter Baxter, Lonnie Coleman, Clarkson Crane, Mike Dawn, Rodney Garland, James Gilmore, Marsh Harris, Ralph Harris, Arnell Larsen, Roger S. Mitchell, Jack Parrish, James H. Ramp, O. F. Simpson, Loren Wahl, William Wainwright, Chick Weston, and Frank Whitfield.

^*
Five of the drawings would also be reprinted in a book published by
Der Kreis
; two of the short stories appeared not only in English, but also in German translation. In addition, in collaboration with Rudolf Jung, Steward would write two stories under the name of Philip Young, one of which appeared in German translation as well.

^*
Orejudos, Chuck Renslow’s lover and partner, had already made a name for himself as an underground homoerotic illustrator.

^*
The question of whether
Tomorrow’s Man
was pornographic depended on local rulings. While not considered pornographic in Illinois, copies of
Tomorrow’s Man
were seized in the unwarranted raid on Newton Arvin’s home in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1960 and (along with
Physique Pictorial
) were described as “pornographic” by Massachusetts authorities.

^*
Most of Renslow’s models wore posing straps, since the possession and sale of nude photography was at that moment not only illegal, but also subject to vigorous prosecution. He did, however, sometimes photograph men in the nude.

^*
Étienne is French for Stephen.

^*
The bodybuilder Sig Ulmanis.

^*
Renslow was not Steward’s only procurer, however; another neighborhood acquaintance, Red Jackson, frequently introduced him to rougher working-class men, mostly black, who were also willing to have sex with him for pay.

^*
As a result of this legal mess, Renslow decided to get involved in Chicago politics. Through carefully working the Chicago political system, he eventually assured his businesses’ stability and financial success. In years to come he would own gay bars, gay gyms, gay restaurants, gay publications, and gay bathhouses, and eventually found and run IML, or International Mr. Leather, the yearly convention of leathermen and sex enthusiasts that has taken place annually in Chicago for over twenty-five years, and which is currently the largest yearly convention held in Chicago.

^*
House of prostitution.

^*
LeRoy Adams, a (married) black jazz pianist with whom Steward had sex on a regular basis from 1948 through 1960.

^*
A professional wrestler and hustler whom Steward hired regularly through Renslow from 1958 through 1960.

^*
Pogue
is a (now obsolete) derogatory slang term describing a young man who submits to the sexual advances of another male.

^*
Vale
is Latin for “farewell.”

^*
Now lost; Steward kept no carbons of them, and Burckhardt’s papers disappeared after his death.

^*
Steiner, who was both Mr. Chicago and Mr. Illinois, later became a Chicago policeman. Steward would have sex with him thirty-six times at a cost of ten dollars a time, the last encounter taking place on a visit to Chicago in 1966.

^*
By “S” Steward meant “sadist” or “sexual dominant.”

^*
New York: Farrar, Straus, 1941.

^*
Steward is referring to
Sartor Resartus
, an enigmatic novel by Thomas Carlyle first published in 1838, whose central character, a philosopher named Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, holds that it is up to the individual to construct his or her own sense of the meaning or purpose of life.

^*
Better known as the
Oraculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia
, by Baltasar Gracián y Morales, first published in 1647.

^*
Steward’s re ference is to “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff” from
A Shropshire Lad
. His meaning about “start[ing] over” is clearer in the context of the poem:

…down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

 

 

^*
The Stud File entry for “Pete, a hustler” notes that the two met twice within the same week for “violent” and “enthusiastic” encounters.

^*
Stud File note: “Courtesy Red Jackson Pimping Service. Hillbilly. $3. White legs. Unc[ut], said: (reaching down): ‘Lemme pull the hide back.’”

^*
Johnny Reyes, though heterosexual, had been continuously molested since the age of twelve by his uncle Mike, who also beat him and pimped him out to others. Steward wrote of Reyes’s experience of childhood sexual abuse (which he only learned about several years into their relationship) in
Understanding the Male Hustler
(pp. 56–57). He also fictionalized it in the story “Jungle Cat,” and enumerated its particulars in the Stud File—which has entries for both Johnny and “Uncle Mike” Reyes, because somehow in the course of knowing Johnny, Steward also negotiated a (single) sexual encounter with Johnny’s abusive uncle.

^*
Steward’s “Payments to hustlers” card in the Stud File ceases to record payments in 1969, though he did continue to hire them and record the encounters in his sex calendars. Such expenditures would peak in 1964, when Steward spent a grand total of $1,033 buying sex. The number of payments would then steadily decrease through the end of the 1960s.

^*
Eugene Weidmann (1908–1939), the killer who was the last man to be publicly executed in France, and with whom Jean Genet was obsessed.

^*
Reyes had spoken to Steward of leaving him to work in a male brothel owned by a criminal named J. P. Boyd. After Roy Robinson (who had once worked for Boyd) told Steward that Boyd routinely worked his hustlers to exhaustion and never gave them their promised cut of earnings, Steward convinced Reyes not to go there. He did so in part by continuing to employ him.

^*
The Student Union, located at the center of the Indiana University campus, contains a hotel in which visitors to the Institute for Sex Research were usually lodged.

^*
Toklas’s reference is specifically to Pius XII’s interest in Huysmans’s late novel
The Oblate of St. Benedict
, which chronicled Huysmans’s acceptance of Catholicism—not Huysmans’s early, “decadent” novels such as
Against the Grain
.

^*
As of 2008, Green’s massive diary has not been published or placed in a public archive. Bowdlerized versions of certain sections have, however, appeared in both French and English.

^*
Robert Giraud, coauthor (Paris, 1950).

^*
Wearing a red or a lavender necktie was one of the coded ways in which homosexuals identified themselves—both to one another and to potential trade—in the years before gay liberation.

^*
By 1962, all the older, syndicate-run bathhouses of Chicago had disappeared. The Congressman, in the basement of the Congress Hotel, had been torn down with the widening of the Eisenhower Expressway; the Lincoln Baths, in the basement of the Lincoln Hotel on Clark Street, had been raided and closed.

^*
As that desire changed or evolved the individual was free to leave, though in several instances (notably with a young man named Patrick Ryan) Renslow would attempt to keep him. (Renslow repeatedly stalked Ryan even after the young man moved to San Francisco.)

^*
By the early 1960s, the leather movement became visible in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco through the establishment of various private clubs and public drinking establishments. In September 1965, Renslow, Raven, and Orejudos (along with seven other men) drew up the Constitution of the Second City Motorcycle Club, a club that was essentially an S/M sex club for gay men—whether or not they owned a motorcycle.

^*
Now known as the oldest gay organization in the state of Colorado, the Rocky Mountaineers later evolved into a gay social club with a mission to promote motorcycle riding in the community, and also to raise money for charitable causes.

^*
BDSM stands for “Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, and Masochism.”

^*
Steward is referring (not without irony) to the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley, which ends: “It matters not how straight the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll, / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.”

^*
Eos
is Greek for “dawn” and Latin for “them.”

^*
From September 1965 through June 1966, Steward would also contribute a monthly column (“Laederfront, USA”) to yet another Kim Kent spinoff publication,
MANège
, which featured articles on, and images of, leather.

^*
Steward had first published this story with
Der Kreis
in March 1960; publication in
Eos
followed a year later.
Der Kreis
would reprint the story (in German) in 1965.

^*
Though written by “Phil Andros,” the story has a protagonist named Bennett.

^*
Steward’s interest in black men also led him to write “The Negro Homosexual in America,” an essay for
Amigo
describing the particularly difficult lives black homosexual men faced in the United States. (
Amigo
no. 21, January 1964, pp. 31–35, 42.)

^*
The story is “The Poison Tree,” a story of sexual revenge based upon an experience Steward had had while working for the summer at Glacier Park, Montana, in the summer of 1935. The title comes from Blake’s poem “A Poison Tree” from
Songs of Experience
(1794).